Books

A Plausible God: Secular Reflections on Liberal Jewish Theology by Mitchell Silver

Joel Marks asks ‘New God or no God?’.

The story goes that while being processed for imprisonment, Bertrand Russell was filling out a form that asked what his religion was. He wrote “atheist” (or perhaps “agnostic”), whereupon the jailer remarked, “Isn’t it wonderful? We may belong to different religions, but we all believe in the same one God.” This gave the philosopher a chuckle, but there may be more truth to it than he supposed. More recently, theologian Karen Armstrong has argued in her book A History of God (1993) that atheism is always a response to a particular notion of God. Since what is meant by God differs from era to era, not to mention from culture to culture, denomination to denomination, etc, atheism turns out to be an historically-conditioned concept.

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